That’s a big difference, but there’s no need to start grappling your forehead and deleting Facebook Pages left and right. It’s important to keep in mind that all of these channels work together, not against each other.

Social media sites, in general, are a far more casual environment that can help build brand awareness, provide bite-size bits of industry information, and create communities among your customers.

That said, email has the advantage of directly reaching a single person. Not only that, you can use analytics to see what that person clicks and opens, which are statistics you can use to segment your list and direct different customers to personalized destinations.

Some resources…

If the study’s findings have made you wonder how you can better combine social media and email marketing, here are four resources that can help these initiatives work in tandem, so you can make use of email’s selling power and social media’s relationship engine:

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I completely agree with this! A direct e-mail with relevant information, news, pictures, & coupon, & so forth seems to work much better then ANY social media we have used. That’s not to say social media does not have it place for a more casual branding inside information for potential clients & existing ones too. I sometimes think the whole social media trend may be a bit over-hyped for the small business owner, nice but not = results for us & our industry (medical clinic).

Blaise Lucey •

You bring up a good point — part of the difficulty with social media that many businesses face is an audience conflict. Different industries have vastly different experiences on Facebook, Twitter, etc, because of who their customer base is.

Social media can help with general promotion, then email marketing can drive a sale home, especially if a prospect already knows you from your social media presence and then signs up for email campaigns & newsletters.